The Lily Hand and Other Stories (22 page)

‘That's understood, sir. I respect your evidence, and in return you'll realize that I have my duty to do, on the facts as I know them.'

‘Good! Would it be in order for me to talk to him alone?'

‘Certainly, if you think it's any good. He's in the next room.'

‘But first,' said the Governor, checking at the door, ‘may I point out one thing? This boy was on his way back to us after a five-day home leave. He should have caught the connection at Lowbridge at 9.25, and by his being here at all he must have fulfilled his bargain up to that point. When he didn't arrive I assumed, as I'm still assuming, that he missed that connection. Now he turns up here, ten miles out of his way by your reckoning, but, by mine, on the nearest point on the road between Stapleton and Mordenfield. There's a bus from Stapleton at 9.45. My estimate is that when he missed his train he begged a lift on the first car he saw heading in the direction of the Stapleton road, to try and catch that bus.'

‘It would make a good story,' agreed the Superintendent, solidly entrenched against believing in it.

‘In which case it should be possible to trace the car.'

‘If he'll give us a description, we'll try. But I'm afraid he's going to need more that that.'

‘That's evidently what he thinks, too,' said the Governor, and went into the room where the boy was.

His heart chilled with dismay at the sight of him. He was sitting compactly and resignedly upon an upright chair, his feet planted neatly together, his hands clenched tightly upon the brim of the new trilby in his lap, his eyes roving with narrowed, stoical despair from the constable who kept him company to the window and the door. These were not possible means of escape to him now, they were tunnels to the other, the forfeited world.

He had receded far down the subterranean passage from freedom to the dark anonymity out of which he had been coaxed with so much pain, and so extraordinary a delight, during the last two years. The thin, intense face, lately wildly responsive to every recognition, had congealed into a formal mask of withdrawal and loneliness, as though he defied anyone ever to touch him again; but the alert eyes were frenzied with despair.

Even when he saw the Governor enter his expression did not change; only the eyes fixed on the newcomer hopelessly, almost indifferently, as though from a great distance.

This was the very face they had seen turned upon them when first he came to Mordenfield. Could everything be undone in one hour, like this?

The constable looked over the Governor's shoulder into the Superintendent's face, and got up and went out, closing the door after him.

The Governor said: ‘Hullo, Harry.' He had never called him that before, and after tonight he probably never would again, but there is a time for everything, and now it seemed so inevitable that he did not even notice it. ‘You'd better tell me all about it,' he said. ‘I'd tell you some of it myself, but they might not like it that way round, so you tell me.'

The boy said in a slightly lame voice, as though the effort of silence had already partly disabled him from speech: ‘I bet they've told you all that matters to them. I got picked up in a house where I'd no right to be. What more do you want?'

The Governor lifted a chair, and set it opposite to the one on which Harry sat. When he found himself compelled to meet someone else's eyes so closely, the boy turned his head away, but the gesture, instead of being defiant, was indescribably revealing, and more like a convulsion of pain than a gesture of rejection.

‘I want to know
why
you went in there,' said the Governor. ‘I could make a guess, but they wouldn't be interested in my guesses. So you tell me. Why did you go into the house? Because, of course, it wasn't to steal.'

The head turned again, abruptly, the eyes flared wide. ‘I haven't said it wasn't, have I?' His thin hands, nervous as a girl's, tightened violently on the brim of the hat.

‘You don't have to say it. I know it.'

‘You think you can kid me with a confidence trick like that?' said the boy unpleasantly. ‘I've had all that once. I'm over it.' But he began to shake, and had to dig his heels into the floor and his teeth into his lip to suppress the weakness.

The Governor didn't argue; he said instead: ‘You missed your connection at Lowbridge, and went up the lane to see if you could hop a car to Hampton's Corner, to try and catch a bus. I don't suppose you made a note of the number – why should you? – but you could describe the car and the driver. It should be possible to find him, and the station staff will be able to confirm how you missed your train. All right, so we've got you to Hampton's Corner. The bus had beaten you to it, after all, and you were still eight miles from home.'

The boy had begun to breathe hard, and the frozen calm of his face was shaken with painful tremors of hope.

‘It wasn't a car, it was a van. A bloke from the beet factory – they work all night in the season.'

‘Better still! Finding the man will be easy, now we know just where to look. Go on from there, then. You were eight miles from home, and getting worried, because it was getting round to the time when we would be expecting you, and you didn't want us to think you'd welshed on us—'

Harry shut his eyes and rolled his head back as if from a punch. ‘What's the use? They won't believe me! Nobody'll ever believe me! I could have told them, but what the hell's the good? Let me alone, can't you? I was all set to take it, and you come beggaring in here and unwind me—'

‘You wanted us to know,' said the Governor patiently, as if there had been no interruption, ‘that you were on your way, before you walked the eight miles, or hitched a lift if you were lucky. You're making me tell it all for you, Harry. You might make just a small contribution yourself.'

The thin hands came up and clenched the short dark hair at the temples and out of the trembling mouth speech came pouring in jerks and recoveries, like arterial blood.

‘I wanted to phone you and tell you why I was late – and that I was coming as quick as I could. There's no call box all along that road, and anyhow, I didn't have any coppers. I saw the phone wires went to that house, so I went up to the door and rang the bell, to ask if I could use their line – but nobody answered, and there was this room, with the curtains not drawn, and a bit of fire still in – and I could see the phone in there on top of the bureau. I tried the window – I know it was daft. I wish I'd never touched it, but I did – and it went up, and I thought, it'll only take me a minute, so I shinned over the sill and went and started to dial. I know I shouldn't have gone in – but it looked so easy, and there was nowhere else to ring from, and I thought for sure there was nobody in. They never answered the door, and all the front lights was off.

‘But I no sooner got a couple of numbers dialled when I heard him in the hall, and I put the phone back, quick, and stood still, hoping he'd go away. I knew then I'd been a fool – I was scared to go out and come clean to him. And the next minute he was in on me, whistling like mad, and the lights all on, and – and I run for it. With my record, what else could I do but run? Nobody's going to believe
that
for a tale – not from me! With my record, what else could I do but run?'

Listening to him bleed, himself weak with an exquisite, singing relief, the Governor thought: Now it's up to me to get him out of this!

And he found time, between the pulsations of his gratitude, to be deeply afraid; for it was certainly he who had stripped the boy's armour of loneliness from him, and unless something better could be put in its place he might die of the cold.

To know truth when you hear it is one thing, to prove it to the police quite another. And what kind of evidence had he to offer, except the station staff at Lowbridge, and the van driver, though the latter was certainly a godsend? He prayed that Harry might have talked about himself to this chance acquaintance in the dark, but he knew how unlikely that was.

No, it was up to him to put out his hand, and pluck proof out of the air. If one has faith enough, it ought to be possible, and he had claimed an absolute faith. His mind began to read over, word for word, all the things Harry had told him, looking with particular industry for the minute revelations he did not know he had made.

‘You must repeat all that to the Superintendent, just as you've told it to me.'

‘What's the use? There's nobody to bear me out, after I got out of the van. And
he
doesn't know but what I come there just to lift whatever was lying around.'

‘You'll tell him, all the same. Do as I ask you. You know you can rely on me.' He did not add, but he knew that Harry heard: ‘As I knew I could rely on you.'

‘I am promising him a miracle,' he thought to himself, ‘and he believes me. And now I have got to produce one.'

He went to the door and opened it. The Superintendent looked up knowingly from his desk, rather surprised, even rather disappointed, that the enthusiast should have given up so soon.

‘I wonder if you would hear Bayford's story now? He's ready to tell it.'

The boy went through it again almost word for word, his eyes returning always to the Governor's face, and resting there with such trust and such terror that it seemed altogether too much for one man to carry.

‘We'll certainly make enquiries for the driver of the factory van,' said the Superintendent at the end of the recital. ‘For the rest of the story, it holds together, but you'll allow there's been time for thinking it out, and I should have been more impressed if it had been told immediately. It's a pity there can't be independent confirmation. I'm sure you accept it, sir, and I take it for granted you're in good faith in urging it upon me. But I have to deal with evidence, and you'll agree there's very little possibility of finding any to support this version of what happened.'

The Governor said, aware of the eyes which held fast to him as to life: ‘I think I can supply you with two pieces of evidence which will go a very long way towards confirming Bayford's story. I start with the advantage, you see, of having no doubts at all about his honesty in the matter, so I can explore the details of what he's told us even more closely than he can, in his present state. You know this man Simpson? He isn't, by any chance, deaf?'

‘Good Lord, no,' said the Superintendent, astonished. ‘He hears as well as any of us.'

‘And he was in the house when it was entered, so he must have been there when Harry rang the bell. Make no mistake, if he says he rang the bell and got no answer, that's exactly what happened. I don't expect you to be sure, but
I
am sure. Therefore I think it very probable that you can tell Mr Simpson something he doesn't know about his own house. The front door bell is out of order. At least you can send a constable round to test it, can't you?'

The Superintendent gave him a long look of mingled patience and derision. ‘We can settle it from here. I'll ring up Simpson, and ask him to try it.'

‘But I'd rather the constable went and did it himself – with all respect to Mr Simpson, but in fairness to Bayford. And at the same time, would you ask him to look into something else there? Knowing Bayford as I do, I know something he hasn't even remembered to tell us. He says he went into the room to telephone, and had already begun to dial when he was interrupted. It didn't occur to him to say that he fully intended to pay for his call, but I tell you so for him—'

The boy's face had suddenly flushed and softened into a wild relief. He opened his lips with a gasp, but the Governor restrained him with a quick pressure of his hand upon the tight fingers that clutched the new hat.

‘If he had already begun to dial his number, he had already paid. The price of a call from Hampton's Corner to Mordenfield is fivepence. Somewhere in that room, unless he had time to pick them up again as he ran for it – which I very much doubt – your constable will find five pennies.'

‘Sixpence!' stammered the boy, faint and sick with eagerness. ‘I told you, I didn't have no coppers – it was a sixpence. I put it inside the top drawer of the bureau, and I never thought about it afterwards.'

He clamped his knees hard together and clenched his hands, to prevent himself from trembling all over.

‘If your constable finds the bell out of action, and the sixpence in the drawer, Superintendent—'

‘If he does,' said the Superintendent, politely tempering his incredulity, ‘it looks as if we shan't have to detain Bayford any longer. That would be clear enough.'

He rose and went out, and they waited in silence, without looking at each other, because there was nothing they had to look for with any uncertainty, it was only other people they had to fear now, and ungentle circumstances.

The Superintendent came back into the room, and sat down again at his desk, staring at the telephone. And once, when the silence had lasted almost ten minutes, he looked up suddenly into the Governor's eyes, and seemed about to ask him something, but thought better of it.

It seemed to him criminal recklessness to go about the world staking your life on other people, like this, but it was none of his business, and the bubble was due to burst any moment, without any pricks from him.

The telephone rang.

They sat breathlessly still, watching and listening as the confident hand lifted it, and the sceptical voice said: ‘Well, what results?'

Then there was a silence. ‘All right,' said the Superintendent flatly, ‘that's all, you can come on back now.'

He laid the telephone resentfully in its cradle; it offended him to see the probabilities disarranged.

‘Well, I should have lost my money. The bell doesn't ring. The sixpence was in the drawer. Bayford, you'll probably never know what a lucky lad you are!'